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Twenty Eight Formulas From Vedic Hymn to Chakra Seed Syllable, Three of Them Closed

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Twenty Eight Formulas From Vedic Hymn to Chakra Seed Syllable, Three of Them Closed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hinduism Mantras gathers twenty-eight formulas, the largest of the atlas's mantra groupings, spanning Vedic hymn verses recited unchanged for millennia, seed syllables assigned to the chakras, deity invocations built on a shared grammatical pattern, and a small set the atlas records as closed without supplying.

The Gayatri Mantra, Rig Veda 3.62.10 with a later liturgical prefix, and the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra addressed to Tryambaka are Vedic in origin and were for centuries restricted by caste and gender before that restriction was widely rejected within Hinduism itself. A large family of deity mantras, Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha, Om Aim Sarasvatyai Namaha and Om Shrim Mahalakshmyai Namaha among them, follow one shared pattern, a seed syllable plus the deity's name in the dative plus namaha, so that swapping the seed and the name produces the mantra of another deity entirely. A separate set, Lam, Vam, Ram, Yam and Ham, are the seed syllables of the five lower chakras in the Tantric scheme, each paired with one of the five elements.

Three members are recorded as closed rather than given: the Guru-Given Personal Mantra a teacher assigns a disciple at initiation, Om Namo Narayanaya's status in Sri Vaishnavism as a rahasya imparted only at initiation, and the Transcendental Meditation mantra withheld by the organisation that transmits it despite published court-filing lists. The atlas states each restriction and reproduces none of the three.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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